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ANOTHER
WORLD
A Science Fiction Anthology
Edited, with introduction and commentary by
Gardner Dozois
Acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint the following material:
“The Oldest Soldier” by Fritz Leiber. Copyright © 1960 by Mercury Press, Inc. Reprinted by permission of the author and his agent, Robert P. Mills, Ltd.
“After the Myths Went Home” by Robert Silverberg. Copyright © 1969 by Mercury Press, Inc. Reprinted by permission of the author and the author’s agents, Scott Meredith Literary Agency, Inc., 845 Third Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10022.
“The Stars Below” by Ursula K. Le Guin. Copyright © 1974, 1975 by Ursula K. Le Guin. Reprinted by permission of the author and the author’s agent, Virginia Kidd.
“Straw” by Gene Wolfe. Copyright © 1974 by UPD Publishing Corporation. Reprinted by permission of the author and the author’s agent, Virginia Kidd.
“On the Gem Planet” by Cordwainer Smith. Copyright © 1963 by Galaxy Publishing Corp. Reprinted by permission of the author and the author’s agents, Scott Meredith Literary Agency, Inc., 845 Third Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10022.
“Beam Us Home” by James Tiptree, Jr. Copyright © 1969 by Universal Publishing and Distributing Corp. Reprinted by permission of the author and his agent, Robert P. Mills, Ltd.
“The Barbarian” by Joanna Russ. Copyright © 1968 by Damon Knight. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Among the Hairy Earthmen” by R.A. Lafferty. Copyright © 1966 by Galaxy Publishing Corp. Reprinted by permission of the author and the author’s agent, Virginia Kidd.
“Man in the Jar” by Damon Knight. Copyright © 1957 by Galaxy Publishing Corp. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Old Hundredth” by Brian W. Aldiss. Copyright © 1960 by Brian W. Aldiss. Reprinted by permission of the author and the author’s agents, Georges Borchardt, Inc.
“The Signaller” by Keith Roberts. Copyright © 1966 by Keith Roberts. Reprinted by permission of the author and the author’s agents, Wallace, Aitken & Sheil, Inc.
Copyright © 1977 by Gardner R. Dozois. All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and articles. Manufactured in the United States of America.
International Standard Book Number: 0-695-40695-7 Titan Binding
International Standard Book Number: 0-695-80695-5 Trade Binding
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 76-19885 123456789 828180797877
Jacket by Carlos Ochagavia
eISBN: 978-1-61824-921-0
Digital version by Baen Ebooks
For
Susan Casper,
who
taught me the
value
of π
The editor would like to thank the following people for their help and support: Virginia Kidd, Robert Silverberg, David G. Hartwell, Susan Casper, Kirby McCauley, Fred Fisher of the Hourglass SF bookstore in Philadelphia, and Tom Whitehead and his staff from the Special Collections Department of the Paley Library at Temple University.
IntroductionEVEN TODAY, people still occasionally ask, “Why do you read science fiction?” This is not always an easy question to answer in an increasingly time-clocked, think-tanked, buttoned-down world. After all, SF won’t help you balance your budget, lose weight, attain nirvana, play the stock market, find a Perfect Mate, or get an exciting, high-paying job as a computer programmer.
So why read the stuff?
Let’s attack that hairy old animal from the flank, obliquely, and see if we can pull it down.
I grew up in New England, an odd corner of the country where cultural dinosaurs linger on long after they’ve died everywhere else, and as a result my childhood is filled with memories that a person of my generation shouldn’t have: working steam trains in operation along the North Shore, scissor-grinder men on bicycle carts, stealing slivers of ice from trucks in the summer, televisionless houses, automobiles that did not fall apart immediately after purchase.
It’s possible that I may also be one of the last people to have undergone the scorn and opprobrium traditionally heaped on people who read science fiction. That doesn’t happen much today, especially not among young people. An SF writer going onto a college campus today is greeted as a celebrity, or at least as a curiosity. He or she is invited into the faculty lounge for bad coffee and surrounded by kids who are actually encouraged by their teachers to read SF, and they ask him some pretty intelligent questions. The same thing applies when an SF writer visits a high school, except that the kids are even more avid and the questions even more intelligent. But when I was a boy, admitting that you read SF was tantamount to admitting that you had lice or ringworm. It took real devotion to keep reading the stuff in the face of constant adverse pressure from parents, teachers, friends, neighbors, from the whole community, in fact. But I did. I ate it up in ton lots with no discrimination whatsoever. And when I started trying to write, SF stories were what I scribbled in my dime-store notebook at night, sometimes writing with a flashlight under the covers, ducking everything and pretending to be asleep when I heard my parents coming. They did not approve of me wasting my time writing, and they especially did not approve of my reading SF, that “mind-rotting junk.” But I kept reading SF. The ban slowed my consumption of it not at all, even if I had to smuggle it into the house and hide it the way kids hide grass today. And it made me high in an oddly similar way.
Edgar Rice Burroughs, A. Merritt, H. Rider Haggard, Doc Smith, H.G. Wells! Boy, did I love it! The wind that whistled across the dead sea bottoms of Barsoom blew also through my bedroom, although the roses on the wallpaper did not stir as it passed. The molten sunlight of enchanted Africa shone upon my room throughout the New England winter; Tharks and dinosaurs came to call; Lemuria rose again in the aspect of our weed-overgrown backyard. I flew the Skylark. I was the Invisible Man. And the key and the conduit for all this magic were the lurid paperbacks that were sold to me like contraband by disdainful drugstore proprietors.
It was the magic that drew me first, the lure of fantastic places and heroic deeds, the dark thrill of Mystery and Distance. Eventually I learned that the best SF was also full of ideas, concepts, codifications, insights into the workings of the world, and that, far from being dry or boring, it was even more exciting, more magical, more full of the “sense of wonder.” I came eventually to agree with Vonnegut’s Mr. Rosewater that SF writers were almost the only ones who “really notice what machines do to us, what wars do to us, what cities do to us, what big, simple ideas do to us . . . the only ones zany enough to agonize over time and distances without limit.”
And yet, for all of that, SF has kept its magic. The best SF is seldom stuffy or pretentious or arrogant in that particularly purblind way that excludes automatically the validity of ideas and viewpoints other than your own. SF is one of the few remaining forms of literature—perhaps the only remaining form—that is entertaining in the full sense of the word, producing both intellectual and emotional excitement, molding magic and rationality, producing healthy hybrids of “escapist entertainment” and “relevancy” that satisfy both the emotions and the mind. The most profound and mind-stretching of stories are apt to be full of excitement, mystery, action, humor. The most lighthearted of romps or the most fast-paced adventure tale is still likely to contain something to make you think, to wonder, to reconsider your values and ideas, to make you suddenly sit bolt upright, covered in cold sweat.
This anthology demonstrates the full range of modern SF, its strength, its eclecticism, its vitality, its ability to conjure up new worlds and new lives, and, more importantly, to make us live in those worlds and through those lives as naturally as if they were our own, without losing any of the wonder, joy, terror, or beauty of the experience. Here is life on another world, in another place, another time. Here is what it is like to wear an alien skin. Here are new concepts, new vistas, magic: a far future society conjures up all the gods and devils and heroes of the distant past with disastrous results; a young semaphore Signalman faces elves, isolation, and a lonely winter death in a twentieth-century England that never was; a self-styled coward, inadvertently caught up in a universe-wide time war, must match wills with a monster in nighttime Chicago; a persecuted astronomer looks into his soul to find wonders as vast as the stars; a barbarian adventuress has a deadly battle of wits with a seemingly omnipotent time-traveler; an intelligent sloth and a mutated baluchitherium roam a haunted future Earth from which humans have forever departed; a boy keeps a lifelong secret that he hopes will take him to the stars; in an alternate Dark-Age Europe, sword-wielding mercenaries travel the countryside in hot-air balloons seeking war and employment; an alien bellhop must deal with his most deadly customer; children from the stars assume human form and play at war and statesmanship with real nations for pawns; an interplanetary wanderer, with his own life at stake, must decide the fate of an immortal horse on a world where precious gems are more common than dirt.
SF is alive—still growing, still changing, still vital. That’s the answer to the question, “Why read science fiction?” It’s alive in a world of dead art, dead minds, dead institutions; it’s a bright-eyed, irreverent little animal scurrying through a petrified landscape of old dead trees; it’s unashamedly potent and prolific in a world that grows increasingly weary and sterile; it dares to raise its voice in boisterous joy, sorrow, and anger in a place full of sour silence and dead echoes.
Gardner Dozois
THE OLDESTSOLDIERFritz Leiber
Hugo- and Nebula-winner Fritz Leiber has long been recognized as one of the modern masters of science fiction. It is less widely known that he is also a master of the macabre, perhaps the foremost modern practitioner of the suspense and supernatural horror tale.
Here he adroitly mingles both genres in a chilling tale of preternatural cat and mouse: a bizarre rearguard action fought through the shadowed streets of nighttime Chicago, where the flap and scurry above you might be wind-blown trash or the beating of dark wings; where the smoldering red pinpoints behind you might he car taillights or cigarette butts or the hungry eyes of something alien and evil.
THE ONE we called the Leutnant took a long swallow of his dark Lowensbrau. He’d just been describing a battle of infantry rockets on the Eastern Front, the German and Russian positions erupting bundles of flame.
Max swished his paler beer in its green bottle and his eyes got a faraway look and he said, “When the rockets killed their thousands in Copenhagen, they laced the sky with fire and lit up the steeples in the city and the masts and bare spars of the British ships like a field of crosses.”
“I didn’t know there were any landings in Denmark,” someone remarked with an expectant casualness.
“This was in the Napoleonic wars,” Max explained. “The British bombarded the city and captured the Danish fleet. Back in 1807.”
“Vas you dere, Maxie?” Woody asked, and the gang around the counter chuckled and beamed. Drinking at a liquor store is a pretty dull occupation and one is grateful for small vaudeville acts.
“Why bare spars?” someone asked.
“So there’d be less chance of the rockets setting the launching ships afire,” Max came back at him. “Sails burn fast and wooden ships are tinder anyway—that’s why ships firing red-hot shot never worked out. Rockets and bare spars were bad enough. Yes, and it was Congreve rockets made the ‘red glare’ at Fort McHenry,” he continued unruffled, “while the ‘bombs bursting in air’ were about the earliest precision artillery shells, fired from mortars on bomb ketches. There’s a condensed history of arms in the American anthem.” He looked around smiling.
“Yes, I was there, Woody—just as I was with the South Martians when they stormed Copernicus in the Second Colonial War. And just as I’ll be in a foxhole outside Copeybawa a billion years from now while the blast waves from the battling Venusian spaceships shake the soil and roil the mud and give me some more digging to do.”
This time the gang really snorted its happy laughter and Woody was slowly shaking his head and repeating, “Copenhagen and Copernicus and—what was the third? Oh, what a mind he’s got,” and the Leutnant was saying, “Yah, you vas there—in books,” and I was thinking, Thank God for all the screwballs, especially the brave ones who never flinch, who never lose their tempers or drop the act, so that you never do quite find out whether it’s just a gag or their solemnest belief. There’s only one person here takes Max even one percent seriously, but they all love him because he won’t ever drop his guard. . . .
“The only point I was trying to make,” Max continued when he could easily make himself heard “was the way styles in weapons keep moving in cycles.”
“Did the Romans use rockets?” asked the same light voice as had remarked about the landings in Denmark and the bare spars. I saw now it was Sol from behind the counter.
Max shook his head. “Not so you’d notice. Catapults were their specialty.” He squinted his eyes. “Though now you mention it, I recall a dogfoot telling me Archimedes faked up some rockets powered with Greek fire to touch off the sails of the Roman ships at Syracuse—and none of this romance about a giant burning glass.”
“You mean,” said Woody, “that there are other gazebos besides yourself in this fighting-all-over-the-universe-and-to-the-end-of-time racket?” His deep whiskey voice was at its solemnest and most wondering.
“Naturally,” Max told him earnestly. “How else do you suppose wars ever get really fought and refought?”
“Why should wars ever be refought?” Sol asked lightly. “Once ought to be enough.”
“Do you suppose anybody could time-travel and keep his hands off wars?” Max countered.
I put in my two cents’ worth. “Then that would make Archimedes’ rockets the earliest liquid-fuel rockets by a long shot.”
Max looked straight at me, a special quirk in his smile. “Yes, I guess so,”...
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